The Enigma Of Musical Taste

I admit I don't have sophisticated musical tastes. On the other hand, it's not a quiz. Everybody is free to like or dislike whatever they choose. The only people who'll judge you are insecure snobs. And who pays any heed to those people anyway?

I've been curious as to what governs taste in music, but my research hasn't been satisfying. The best article I could find was this one, which posits that our love of music is based on past musical experiences. That doesn't explain, however, how a style of music we once detested is now deemed pleasurable. This article essentially credits that to peer pressure, but I can't buy into that. My musical listening has mostly been solitary (as it should be). Maybe I'm one of those snobs, because anytime someone tells me that I should listen to something, basically because "it'll be good for me", I rebel.

I'm more in agreement that something that reminds us of something else that was imprinted on our brains when they were in their formative state is something we'll latch onto. Most people subconsciously gravitate toward the familiar.

Mostly I believe that the music popular during a happy time in one's life will naturally produce endorphins. I could graph the music I like best next to my life circumstances at the time, and the spikes would line up almost perfectly. On the other hand, there are songs that, when I hear them, depress me, even though they're perfectly nice songs, but they remind me of a bad period in my life.

How would some music fare, absent any coupled memories? Not well. Listening to some of these songs today (particularly from the sixties) objectively, I wonder what I ever heard in them. I guess you had to be there, which proves my point.

That doesn't, however, explain why a person may love a style of music that does not exist in their musical cognition. I am a geek for Big Band music. Glenn Miller songs make me swoon. Where did that come from? Some things are simply innate, and there is no explanation for them. Not everything is explainable.

There are a couple genres of music that make my skin crawl. One of them is show tunes. There's a current commercial (for what company, I don't choose to know) in which a woman sings, "I want the world. I want the WHOLE world". And they mix it with some beats, which makes it even worse, if that is possible. Some folks, however, love love Broadway tunes. And people make fun of country...

Jazz? I don't get it and I don't see the point. I could attend any high school band class and listen to them tuning up and experience the same phenomenon.

But that's really all. Oh, and heavy metal, which is just a cacophony of anger and hair.

I can even (sort of) tolerate Crosby, Stills, and Nash. At least their music doesn't cause me to gnash my teeth; at least not until they get too cutesy and feminine.

Some people simply love any or all of the above, and I say, you go, people! Good music should be anything that sears your heart.

That's the thing about music ~ it's personal. Nobody needs to know why you like a certain song, because it's nobody's business but yours. Just don't try to convince someone that it's the greatest thing ever, because they won't get it and then you'll end up frustrated and defensive.

Just keep it to yourself. And rock on....

Sixty-Four Years of Music ~ Yes, I Was Once a Tween

There's a certain age in a girl's life when her options for adventure are extremely limited. She's too young to drive, too old for a bicycle (which wouldn't take her far anyway). Luckily, helicopter parents hadn't yet been invented. Parents in the sixties were the opposite of helicopters ~ maybe more like Poseidon Adventure parents ~ sink or swim. It wasn't that they didn't care; but their lives didn't revolve around their kids, as much as shows like Leave It To Beaver tried to convince people. We were expected to show up for meals, kind of a "proof of life" gesture; otherwise it was preferable for all concerned that we find ways to occupy ourselves.

My friend Alice's parents were a bit more involved in her life. I remember riding the bus with Alice to her house after school and lazing about on kitchen stools and her mom asking how her day was. That was bizarre! I think she might have even asked me, which rendered me tongue-tied. I don't think my mom ever expressed interest in my daily life until I turned forty.

When Alice and I were on our own, we had very few diversions. Playing records, essentially. I'd almost gotten run over by a freight train at age ten when riding my bike across a railroad bridge, so my adventurous streak was by now muted. Alice lived out in the country, albeit in a facsimile of a neighborhood consisting of a strip of six or seven homes surrounded on all sides by tall prairie grass. It was too far to walk to any semblance of civilization, but those seven families held fifties-style parties on Friday or Saturday nights, with pot luck dishes, music, and gallons of booze.

I, on the other hand, lived sort of in the country, too, but my home was surrounded by businesses. My parents owned a 52-unit motel where we resided in a gloomy attached apartment; and there were eating establishments on either side of us and another motel across the highway, as well as a local Volkswagen dealership. Further down the road was Kist's Livestock Barn and another supper club and a watermelon stand (yes). When Alice stayed overnight with me, we feasted on candy bars from the lobby machine, purchased with quarters from the office cash register and ten-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola acquired in the same manner.

One warm night of summer when vacancies were abundant, Mom allowed Alice and me to stay in one of the motel's double rooms. We made a pact that we were going to stay up all night. Somehow we had secured a box of No-Doz, so fueled by white tablets and copious green-tinged bottles of Coke, we found ourselves wide awake at two o'clock in the morning. Like all adolescent notions, this journey turned out to be a bust. I'd brought my transistor, and we danced atop the beds to the grooviest hits of the day.

This video is a replication of what the actual song might have looked like performed live:

This performance actually does feature supercilious Graham Nash, before he was too haughty to perform pop songs:

At some point in the middle of the night, we decided to smear on white lipstick and tie cloth belts around our foreheads and venture out to act "cool". Lee's Steakhouse was just a short jaunt through the trees. Despite its name, Lee's was just a cafe; one that stayed open 24 hours a day. It was a magnet for late-night club-hoppers who had a sudden craving for pancakes and maple syrup. Lee's served up a mouth-watering fried chicken basket (in an actual basket) with fries and a tiny cup of cole slaw. Lonely guys would nurse a steaming cup of coffee in a booth alone and flirt with Hilda, the late-shift waitress. The family that owned Lee's lived in an actual house behind the restaurant and their kids were great friends of my little brother and sister. And I knew Hilda from having hung around the cafe on my bored days. She was twenty-something and very kind.

Alice and I had about thirty-five cents between us as we sauntered through the door of Lee's at three a.m., barefoot (which apparently was allowed back then), wearing shorts and sleeveless blouses; our foreheads encircled by macrame headbands. We slid inside a booth, sipped water, and when Hilda stopped by with her pad and a puzzled look, said "No thanks, just water". We chomped on crackers from the little plastic boats parked on the table and slurped water from beveled glasses through paper straws.

Occasionally I'd stroll over to the juke box, slip a couple of dimes in the slot and punch up records we liked:

Our thirst for attention went unsated. The only person in the place who found us weird was Hilda, and she wasn't thrilled that no tip would be forthcoming from the saltine munchers. There were two lone guys in the place who probably had issues of their own they were dealing with, and two spotlight-hungry pre-teens didn't warrant a speck on their radar.

After an hour we tromped back to our motel room. The night was black and the world eerily quiet. And we were still bug-eyed from the amphetamines. We crawled into our respective beds and gabbed until eventually we fell asleep and dozed until mid-afternoon.

Sorry this story doesn't have a blockbuster ending, but the life of a thirteen-year-old in the mid-sixties was drearily mundane. 

Out Of Touch

The only site I know of that talks about country music is called Saving Country Music. I enjoy it, but I often find myself befuddled, because I am obviously, sadly, out of the current country music loop.

Don't get me wrong ~ the site hardly promotes the latest faux-country acts. But it talks about artists that are ostensibly country that I have never in my life heard of. I've been gone too long.

I've lately made an effort to educate myself about new music. I'm listening to sampling Saving Country Music's Spotify playlist each week. Out of twenty-five songs, I'm lucky to find one I really like, two that don't completely suck and I skim about the first two lines of the rest.

I think I've identified what's wrong with most of the new music a roots site like Saving Country Music promotes ~ it's too introspective. Strummy acoustic guitars lead off too many of the songs. I feel like I'm about to suffer through a Joan Baez ballad. I liked country music (at least the late eighties/early nineties country) because it was ballsy. George Strait singles don't flutter in like a weepy butterfly. They hit you with twangy Telecaster, crying steel and a crunch of fiddle. They make you feel good. Even after all these years:

Could you imagine something like this being played on the radio today?

I think well-intentioned sites that do want to save country music are searching in vain for the sound, but the sound just isn't being made anymore; so they go with the best of the rest. It's an unfair comparison, really. 

Too, I am out of touch. Roots fans rave about certain acts, and when I queue them up on YouTube, I think, this is good? I've seen better bar bands.

I will keep trying, though. Who knows? There might be someone good out there I've yet to hear. 

And then suddenly I'll get on board.

Sixty-Four Years of Music ~ Taking a Sharp Turn

Kids are very durable. Flexible ~ sort of like Gumby. The first time a bad thing happens, they freak out, but freaking out night after night is exhausting; so intuition eventually kicks in. It's amazing what a kid can disregard while remaining keenly attuned to her surroundings. It becomes a way of life. I'm not certain that my sense of hearing is sharper than most people's, but it's damn good. It's all those years of practice. Inevitably, bad things would happen at night, because that's when a drunk manages to stumble home. Night is when the screaming brawls occur.

There was a time in my life when I could fall asleep easily. That ended around age eleven and I've been cursed with insomnia ever since. Every little floor creak, even with foam plugs shoved inside my ears, startles me. It's the "fight or flight" phenomenon. My dad was a falling-down, albeit happy drunk, while my mom was enraged, spewing sailor's epithets, her fingernails clawing his face. At ten o'clock at night, with an early morning bus to catch,

I essentially ignored the rows and tried to fall back asleep like my younger brother and sister had done quite effortlessly on the bottom bunk. Still, I had to be on guard for that moment when my mom would scream, "Call the sheriff!" and I would have to slide down from my second-story tower and stumble to the telephone and lie that my dad was assaulting my mother, when in fact, he was deliriously content on his makeshift bed on the shag carpet, and she was the one who was dangerously homicidal.

This new reality began right at the time I'd been uprooted from the only home I'd ever known and plopped down in the middle of the parched prairie with no friends and no lifelines ~ because life would be "better" here.

My pop singles soothed me for a time. If I cranked up the volume enough, I could almost drown out the screaming. Then a completely unexpected thing happened ~ I made a friend. When kids meet other kids, the primary topic of conversation (at least then) was music. "Who do you like?" "What's your favorite record?" I expected to hear The Beatles or at the very least The Monkees, but Alice said, "I like country music." Well, this was an unanticipated response. Country music? My parents owned a Ray Price album and a Buck Owens album. I also knew who Bobby Bare was. That, in a nutshell, was my encyclopedic knowledge of country.

Becoming friends with Alice was like jetting across the ocean to a foreign country for the first time. I had to forget everything I'd ever known and take a crash course in Esperanto, otherwise known as twang. I sat cross-legged on the floor of her living room while she spun records by people I'd never heard of once in my life. Granted, she had some very obscure tastes, like Carl Butler and Pearl (as they were booked) and Porter Wagoner, who wasn't at all good until he teamed up with a blonde bee-hived little girl singer.

The most revelatory artist Alice introduced me to was named Merle Haggard, who was brand-spankin' new on the scene, but definitely had a certain something I could get on board with. This Haggard guy's recordings were heavy on Telecaster, bass, and crying steel. His music reminded me a bit of my parents' Buck Owens albums, only with far superior singing and heart-searing harmonies. This was someone I could claim as my own and stamp myself a country fan. Thank God. Because I was worried I wouldn't like anybody and then I'd lose my new friend as quickly as I'd found her (or, more accurately, as she'd found me).

Adaptability is innate. Once you discover something, then you discover other somethings. The first thing I discovered without Alice's help was Waylon Jennings.

There was a new guy who was being played on the radio (I'd since switched my allegiance from KFYR to KBMR) and both Alice and I liked this song. Later we heard rumors about him that couldn't possibly be true, because he was stone country:

As for female singers, there were a few, but she was the ultimate:

Although this new gal was pretty good:

Yep, I'd become immersed. And it didn't take long. Eventually I saved up my pennies and bought that red acoustic guitar in the window at Dahmer's Music and Alice came over and taught me how to form chords. Now I could play along with my favorite Haggard and Pride songs.

I became even better at drowning out the scuffles happening outside my bedroom door. I'd found a reason to soldier on.

Country music turned into everything for me. Until it wasn't. Until it disappointed me.

But that would take a few years....

Sixty-Four Years of Music ~ Continued

Musical Doldrums

I continued aboard the pop music train until around 1968. If one peruses the top hits of '68, it's apparent that music took a nosedive. I'm not sure what happened. Maybe The Beatles were tired. Maybe the Summer of Love ruined everything. Maybe my life was falling apart.

I don't remember how I came into possession of my battery-operated record player, but I carried it with me throughout my early teens. It was fun at first, but the fun abruptly ended once the batteries wore down. I'd be merrily playing "Thank The Lord For The Night Time" when suddenly Neil Diamond began singing really low and slowwww. I didn't have money to constantly purchase size D batteries and trust me, they weren't alkaline. My dad picked up a so-called battery charger somewhere, which barely masked the problem. Seems those Evereadys were just as tired as The Beatles.

Still, in 1967, pop music retained a glint of joy. I continued to be a mostly singles buyer. The Turtles recorded on the White Whale label, whose '45 color was oddly blue, not white. Neil Diamond was on Bang, with its yellow label with a revolver atop shooting out the word "Bang". The Monkees' Colgems singles sported a prosaic red and white design. The Grass Roots' Dunhill singles were elegantly black. (I wonder what possessors of mp3's stare at while their song is playing.) 

I had my favorites, like this one. I don't think The Turtles were ever taken seriously by the music biz people, but the execs sure liked the money that rolled in:

Lulu had one hit song, but it did land her a part in a movie, so she had a year. This really is beautiful:

I'm not sure what the deal was with Alex Chilton. Granted, he was only sixteen, but he acted like a reluctant fifth grader whose mom pushed him out on the stage. Nevertheless, this was one of my special songs from 1967:

 

This is the only song I ever liked by Herman's Hermits. Because they were a goofy band that essentially did novelty songs. I can't even stand to listen to Peter Noone on Sirius XM, because he's still trying to sound like he's sixteen, when in actuality he's pushing a hundred and five. However, this is a classy song:

 

This song is perfect for a twelve-year-old. It has that great poppy vibe, and (shucks) this performance doesn't feature Graham Nash, who went on to record some of the most boring songs in musical history about puppies and aprons and tidying up the house with his new, hipper, band, CSN or CSNY (whatever). 

 

The Grass Roots were the first rock concert I ever attended. Of course, I was so high up in the bleachers that I could have just as well been at home peering through binoculars. Much like The Turtles, The Grass Roots got no love. I don't understand that, because they had a lengthy string of hits. (And yes, even though this video is fuzzy, I can pick out Creed from The Office.):

 

By 1967 I'd mostly relinquished my obsession with The Monkees. They'd been my lifeline when my family moved to a new town and I suddenly had zero friends. I wrote about it somewhere ~ oh, here. 

I guess life had become a little bit better in some ways, and a hell of a lot worse in others. I never owned this '45, but my big brother did. As was my wont, I snuck into his room to play his records whenever he was away. I didn't know until recently that Carole King wrote this song. It's probably my favorite Monkees recording:

Thus ended my pop music phase. For a long while.

Next ~ immersing myself in country.

My Sixty-Four Year Musical Journey

The problem with only being able to get one's music from AM radio was that once a song became a hit, the disc jockey played it at least once an hour. This is the primary reason why baby boomers hate certain songs with a passion (Take "Ode To Billy Joe", for instance. Plus Bobbie Gentry never once said what was being thrown off the bridge, and it probably wasn't even anything interesting anyway.) Conversely, if there happened to be a song you really liked but wasn't in the top ten, good luck catching it on the airwaves. If I did happen to catch it, I'd be in the backseat of the car and my dad wouldn't stop yapping long enough for me to actually hear it.

Plus I didn't know what most of these artists looked like. There were some fan magazines with tiny black and white photos of the top groups, and sometimes network variety shows would feature a pop act "for all you kids out there". I always felt sorry for the bands who were just looking for a little promotion and had to endure the mocking of the eighty-year-old host who'd made his name in the vaudeville days.

On a Wednesday night in the fall of 1964, however, a wondrous thing happened ~ and that thing was called "Shindig". Suddenly I could see all the artists who had previously only existed in my brain as breathtaking sounds emitting from a tinny speaker and tiny one-by-two-inch black and white promotional snapshots in celebrity mags. Yes, the show was in black and white, too, but why quibble? Sometime during the show's run, I switched music teachers and had accordion lessons (yes) on Wednesday nights. By the skin of my teeth I made it home by 7:00 p.m. each week, but it was incredibly stressful.

Shindig had its go-go dancers in white-fringe mini-skirts doing the jerk and...well, that's the only dance I remember...but it wasn't overly distracting, and far superior to a geriatric comedian chewing on a fat cigar and spouting, "Take my wife....please." Everyone who was anyone appeared on Shindig ~ The Beach Boys, The Beau Brummels, The Lovin' Spoonful, The Sir Douglas Quintet, The Dave Clark Five, The Supremes, Roy Orbison; even The Beatles. However, the act that still resonates with me from Shindig all these years later is The Righteous Brothers.

I'm guessing The Righteous Brothers probably made more appearances on the show than anyone aside from Bobby Sherman (I guess you had to be there.) Watching Shindig, I was in heaven.

I still had my 45's, too; and my brother's. In retrospect, the singles I liked the best had a couple of requirements ~ an awesome beat was a given. Then either a great production (yea, even at age nine I recognized the great ones) or something a little off-kilter.

These are the ones I loved then:

I have no explanation as to why that song grabbed me, but it most certainly did. I really didn't know anything about Motown. I didn't know about The Temptations or Smokey Robinson and The Miracles. I did know The Supremes, but I had no inkling that this was a huge Detroit conglomerate. I just liked the song.

This one is (and always will be) a marvel. It's the intro. How was I to know that the creator of this song was a musical genius? I didn't know who Brian Wilson was. I didn't even know that most of the guys in the group were named Wilson. I did know that they all wore red and white striped shirts. I loved this song so much that I wrote my own version, called "English Boys" (it was the British Invasion era, after all.) Just like with the album "Help!", ripping off someone else's creation is the sincerest form of flattery:

This is a mostly forgotten song that is amazing. I love, love this song. And it meets my requirement of being a little off-kilter. The lead singer's voice is quirky, almost artificial; the beat (laid down by Honey Lantree) is magnificent, and the rest of the group was instructed to stomp on the floor to enhance the rhythm during the recording process. The Honeycombs only had one hit, but oh, what a hit it was:

The British Invasion was rife in the mid-sixties. The Animals, Freddy and The Dreamers, Gerry and The Pacemakers, Herman's Hermits, The Yardbirds, The Kinks, The Hollies, Manfred Mann. People think that The Stones were the natural rivals to The Beatles, but that's not how it went down in '64. Everybody was saying it was this group that offered The Beatles the most competition. Creatively, no; but one must remember the times and the songs The Beatles were releasing. The Dave Clark Five weren't that far off the mark. And I liked them. And Mike Smith (rest his soul) was a cutie.

Some artists are flashes in the pan; some stand the test of time. The Beatles (naturally) stood the test of time. The Beach Boys, too. The Honeycombs ~ not so much.

Then there are the masters. In a time capsule a hundred years from now, somebody smart will include this guy:

I don't take lightly the fact that I was present for the dawn of a new age of music. I'm lucky. Generally I'm not a lucky person, but on this one I hit the jackpot. I'll always have that. 

And I won't let it slip through my fingers.

What I've Learned About Music In Sixty-Four Years

Sometimes it seems my entire life has been about music. That's not really true. I'm not a weirdo. I have and have had a life. It would be more accurate to say that music has been my backdrop.

Sure, as a kid it was all about music ~ listening to music on the radio and on 45's, whether bought or borrowed from my older sisters and brother. But when you're a kid, how much, really, do you have to fill your brain with? Basically once you learn to read, there's not a lot of interesting endeavors. I wasn't studying the old master's paintings or developing the next vaccine.

I was one of those odd kids, maybe a bit precocious. I honestly don't remember a time when music didn't gush through my veins. I recall peculiar songs from when I was barely two, the ones my parents liked, like "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window" and "Catch A Falling Star".

By the age of five, music was everything to me. My big sisters collected records and our kitchen radio was always on. My sisters did The Twist on our kitchen linoleum. Music was different then ~ not segregated. Our local radio station played everything. I didn't even know there were different genres. It was just "music".

The hugest influence on my youthful musical development was my big brother. He was nine years older and a teenager who was tuned in to the tasty crackling hits of the early-to-mid 1960's. He also had money to buy LP'S. By age nine I was crossing the bridge to Poppler's Records to purchase a 45-RPM record whenever I'd collected enough pennies to afford one. One. If you only have enough money to buy one record, it's an excruciating decision. Because of my brother, I was exposed to music I was too poor to purchase for myself.

When I began my singles collection, it was mostly The Beatles. It's not that The Beatles were the only act, but they were the utmost. Honestly, nobody else came close. I'm not sure who discovered The Beatles first, my brother or me, but I think it was me. By third grade I was smuggling my little transistor radio to school with me, and I distinctly remember having a very serious conversation on the sidewalk after school with Cathy Adair regarding this new group called The Beatles. "I Want To Hold Your Hand" was the current hit, but I sort of liked "She Loves You" better, although it was hard to choose. Each had its virtues.

Cathy and I knew that the guys in the band were named John, Paul, George, and Ringo, and we'd seen pictures of them in our fan magazines. Clearly Paul was the cute one, so I decided he was the singer on The Beatles hits I liked the best. Imagine my surprise when I learned that my favorite Beatle, voice-wise, was actually John.

My brother, on the other hand, was bringing home LP's. When I heard The Beatles' Second Album (yes, that was the title), I was amazed they could write such great songs. I had no inkling the songs on the album were mostly covers.

I continued on my Beatles journey, skipping to Poppler's to buy the single, "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out". Meanwhile, my brother bought Help!.

"Help!" was a revelation to me. It doesn't make many people's lists of their favorite Beatles album, but it's mine. I was obsessed with it. Granted, the drill was, once my brother left the house and once I watched from my bedroom window as his red Ford Fairlane zoomed down the road, I sauntered into his room and pilfered two or three of his albums and slipped them on my tiny record player and listened to my favorite songs over and over. Then I carefully placed the LP's back on his shelf in the correct (memorized) spot. 

To me, the tracks on "Help!" naturally lent themselves to a musical, so I created one. I was ten. This was most likely my first foray into creativity.

Then later that same year came "Rubber Soul". 

In reality, "Rubber Soul" is the best Beatles album. "Help!" is my sentimental favorite, but this is The Best. After each Beatles album, I was ravenously hungry for the next. I salivated when I saw my brother bring this one home and I couldn't wait for him to drive away...

Discovery is a hazy memory. Probably the last time I was chilled by brand new music was 1993. And that was a fluke. "Rubber Soul" is practically perfect, and was especially perfect the first time.

In '65 The Beatles were still a band; not simply a group of solo writers. "Rubber Soul" isn't perfect ~ what album is? There are some clinkers. Even though there was a song named after me on the album, I honestly didn't care for it. John was at his strongest on the LP, although Paul had a couple of nice songs. But there's no denying that the most enduring Beatles song of all time is John's:

Revolver was released in '66, and frankly, I was disappointed. It did have some classic songs, but only maybe two.

 

Then I moved on.

Life changed, The Beatles changed; I had other priorities. But every September 10 I bought my brother the latest Beatles album. I owed him for all those Saturday afternoons when I'd purloined his Beatles LP's. It was only right that I paid him back. But he'd changed, too. He was married and didn't care that much about The Beatles. When I asked him how he liked the Sergeant Pepper album, he said, "It's okay." I was kind of hurt because I had little money and yet, as tradition dictated, I'd plunked my money down to purchase the album for his birthday.

It's not as if The Beatles were my only musical inspiration, ever. There's much more to come in future posts.

But they were, well...basically, everything.